


ice age // how to destroy angels

by 2x2verse (agent_florida)



Series: while(1<2) [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dissociation, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Dom/sub, Light BDSM, Light Bondage, M/M, Medication, Mildly Dubious Consent, Pesterlog, Psychoanalysis, Psychological Trauma, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-03-10 10:43:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 12,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3287324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agent_florida/pseuds/2x2verse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i4JlnSIx2g">required listening</a>]</p><p>Sometimes listening to Jake is like tuning in to radio static. He’s far away and the signal is shit, but by god, you’re trying, aren’t you? He can be sitting right in front of you and it still feels like he’s coming through from centuries away, voice distorted, lips moving out of sync with his words. Maybe there are subtitles you’re missing. “Dirk,” he’ll say. “Are you listening?”</p><p>“Yes,” you’ll tell him, still trying to crack the signal.</p><p>[sex in ch. 7 severable from the rest]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1:1

**_i find it looks the same but everything has changed_ **

Sometimes listening to Jake is like tuning in to radio static. He’s far away and the signal is shit, but by god, you’re trying, aren’t you? He can be sitting right in front of you and it still feels like he’s coming through from centuries away, voice distorted, lips moving out of sync with his words. Maybe there are subtitles you’re missing. “Dirk,” he’ll say. “Are you listening?”

“Yes,” you’ll tell him, still trying to crack the signal. You touch the fingertip of each finger to the heel of your palm in turn. Is it Morse code? It’s like he’s on the other side of a television screen, a computer monitor. You can’t quite process that he’s here, not two feet from you, within reach if you cared to stretch out your arm. You frown as you watch his mouth.

“Land’s sakes, man, I’m trying to tell you I’m worried about you and all you give me is this vacant stare,” he says, hands flying without aim or purpose. Is it sign language? You follow the trace of his fingertips in the air. The muscles in your forearms furl and unfurl.

You don’t know the script for this. You don’t know what you’re supposed to say. “I know,” you settle for. The sensation of your mouth moving pulls against muscles you normally don’t notice. Your vocal cords thrum strangely.

“Oh, Dirk,” he says, brows drawing together, and then he stands and comes to you and leans down and embraces you. Having never been embraced for sixteen years, you are still unpracticed at this, and so he is not surprised when your hands remain at your sides—still touching fingertip to palm in rhythmic succession, unable to stop. Your neurons break down the contact to its component parts: forearms around yokes of shoulders, hands at balls of shoulders, forehead pressed against column of throat, breath heating cloth over sternum.

He doesn’t seem to understand. He’s embracing a body. He isn’t embracing you.


	2. 1:2

**_i find remembering gets harder every day_ **

Jake’s eyes are bright, glasses reflecting the movie idly nattering on the television. “Do you remember the first time I told you I loved you?” he asks, arm snaking around your shoulders.

“Yes.” You know this is the right answer. Whether it’s true is another matter entirely. You’ve recited the story to yourself so many times it might as well be a real memory of yours. It’s like looking at pictures that were taken at the time, listening to the myth being told, and convincing yourself you were actually there. “We were on LOTAK. You told me to take a deep breath, and you took my helmet off, and you kissed me, and you nearly died whispering it in my ear.”

“Would have been a capital way to go,” he says, grinning like a fool. He’s going to fuck you tonight. Or perhaps this is like an inside joke to him. That smile could mean a few different things and you can’t quite narrow it down yet. “And the first time you told me?”

“I—“ That one brings you up short.  “I,” you drawl out again. This isn’t a story you’ve told yourself often enough. “Tell me,” you say to him instead. “It always sounds better when you say it.” You’re in the right mental file cabinet, but finding the precise drawer and set of files is taking longer than you were expecting. You weren’t the one who organized this part.

“How can you not remember?” That sly-dog smile is fading a little. “I’d just killed a skeleton fellow who’d been advancing on you, and you looked at me with that mask and just said it and I was floored, absolutely floored.”

“That wasn’t the real first time, though.” Can’t have been. That’s nowhere in your memories. Usually it’s Bro who’s in combat mode, not Dirk, although you were learning so much towards the end of your session that Bro let you pilot a few times here and there. That being said, it wouldn’t surprise you if Jake had glommed onto this particular circumstance—Bro has no problem telling worthy adversaries and fellow combatants that he appreciates their skills.

A slight line forms between Jake’s eyebrows. “What did I miss, then? Was it before or after?”

Much, much after. “It’s… I can’t explain.”

“So you’ve lied to me about it?” Jake pulls back his arm.

“No—“ This isn’t going anywhere good. He’s going to figure out you don’t actually recall if you keep bluffing like this. So you go for broke. Straight, flat broke, doubling down on this already-disastrous bet by pulling out some _Love Actually_ -style bullshit. “I—I mean, I’ve said it, we’ve said it, so many times, and every day it feels like—every minute I get a new reason to say it, I mean, so every single time I say it is like the first time.” Was that English towards the end? You’re not sure you’re making yourself understood.

Jake’s mouth has fallen open a little. He snaps it shut so fast his teeth click together. He puts his hands flat on the sofa cushions, then pushes up. “Turn off the television.”

“Why?” You were watching Bladerunner.

“Because I am going to _ravish_ you until the sun comes up, love.” He extends his hand down to you.

You take his offer. He takes control. You take off.


	3. 1:3

**_sometimes i still believe who i pretend to be_ **

“Dirk,” Jake calls across the apartment.

You don’t respond. The ceiling fan in your workroom raises the tiny hairs on the back of your neck with every whiff of the blades. You are focused on a screw so small you’ve engaged the magnifier on your shades to see it properly. The screwdriver manipulating it does not shake, meaning you can’t be holding it, even though there’s pressure around a grip in your palm. You watch as the pieces get mechanically deconstructed, screw by screw, revealing an almost invisible seam.

“Dirk,” Jake says again, his voice louder.

You want to see what happens next. The seam splits. Inside are wires—all copper, all coated in different colors. The manufacture on this robot says it’s one of your creations, but you don’t remember which functions the white wires correspond to, or the green, or the blue striped with white, or the red, or the yellow. The one who’s working on this chassis is the one who knows all of this. Before your eyes the screwdriver lifts one yellow wire away from the rest, scans across to see its designation written in pixelated letters and numbers—

“Dirk,” Jake repeats, his voice crashing over your consciousness like thunder over the ocean.

You blink. The screwdriver is in your hands. You forget why you isolated this particular wire out of so many others. When you look up, it takes a moment for your eyes to refocus on something not so short-sighted. Jake is immediately to your right. “Hi,” you offer him. It seems like the right thing to say.

“I’ve been calling for you for nearly an hour, love. Aren’t you hungry?”

There is hunger. It doesn’t belong to you. What is yours is the hollow below your ribs and above your hips, the interior space that is pure and purged and empty. “I could eat,” you say instead.

Jake takes the screwdriver out of your hands and laces his fingers between yours. You let him guide you away from your workbench. It’s easier for him to acknowledge that you’re not in control when he’s the one in control.


	4. 1:4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING: SELF-HARM

**_sometimes well everything’s exactly  how it seems_ **

“Strider, you’re a right mess!”

You’ve staggered into the apartment around midnight, holding your left bicep with your right hand and generally slouching westward. Your shirt is shredded; cotton clings to skin damp with sweat and soaked with blood. Your shades are broken. There might be glass in your eye—it’s definitely swollen and throbbing. At the very least you will have the start of a truly magnificent shiner. Blood drips in slow clogs from one of your nostrils, coats the back of your throat. “It’s nothing,” you remind him. Godtier. You’ll regen. You will wake up in a different body, the same person. It’s how you wake up every morning. It’s how you blink between breaths.

What is important now is the pain. There are bright, sharp contacts tethering you to reality. While Jake gently plants a hand between the blades of your shoulders and aggravates a splendid purple-black bruise for the purpose of guiding you out of the doorway, your thighs throb with the impact of multiple deep-tissue wounds as you walk. You might have nicked bone this time. You ought to be more careful. “I sure hope the other fellow is even moreso the worse for wear,” Jake mutters.

Together the two of you leave red-brown shoeprints in the carpet as he helps you to the bathroom. Every movement hurts brilliantly. You are here and now. Your eye belongs to you. Your hands belong to you. Each individual wound belongs to you. That is your blood on the floor. These are your breaths labored and gurgled. “Exactly the same,” you grit out, clenching your teeth so hard you might actually be grinding your molars to a pulp.

Jake eases you down so your bony ass hits the closed lid of the toilet; he takes a seat on the lip of the tub so he can look you over properly, elbows on his splayed knees, hands coated in your blood in prayer position in front of his mouth. “You did this?”

“Maybe,” you tell him. It’s not to avoid responsibility. It’s the honest-to-god truth. You know which parts of you exhibit what tendencies, but you can’t tell him for sure which fracture fractured you in a specific way.

“Great Jehosephat’s ghost,” he mixes his metaphors. “Dirk, I—you shouldn’t have—angel, you ought not to harm yourself like this, I’ve told you, if the impulse comes I can spar with you for a time until it passes—“

“Doesn’t hurt right,” you tell him honestly. A few bones in your fingers might be broken. You like the flexion moving the splinters around under your skin as you clench and unclench your fists.

Jake continues to look you over. It’s a lot to take in. You’re pretty much a puddle of man reassembled into vaguely-human shape. Of course, you’re like this at all times, it just doesn’t show so much externally. What’s important is that Jake isn’t rejecting you outright for how physically broken you are in this moment. There might be hope for you after all.

There’s nothing for him left to do but get out the scissors, strip you out of your clothes. At that point it stops being real. You can feel the injuries—oh do you feel, god can you feel—but looking at them is like peering at a surgical site surrounded by blue paper and steel clamps. You close your eyes and the not-quite-nausea subsides. Jake gets a sea sponge, a basin of warm water, and cleans the worst of the filth from you. He can’t scour the inside of you, can’t reach the truly grimy parts of the inside of your mind, but this is the closest he can come and he does so voluntarily.

“Dove,” he calls you, and after that all you hear is the tone. You can’t organize the syllables into anything coherent; everything is a haze of sharp peaks cutting through the misty valley of endorphins glossing over the truth. Putting an emotion to it is an exercise in futility for your mathematical mind, but you can tell the color of it. A soft but dark red, warm but not burning, close but not suffocating. A few times you can hear him cough as he wrings out the sponge—you went too far this time if he’s attempting to cover his dry heaves like that.

The next time you open your eyes, what greets you is a mess. Not of the lap you see, the hands, the bare chest, but of the room. Smears of grime in the rough pattern of finger tracks litter the edge of the tub, the lip of the sink. Jake has thrown out the sponge and he’s washing his hands. Drying, then washing them again. Once he’s done, he washes them for a third time, this time with peroxide as the final rinse. There are no stitches. You don’t need any. You will wake up looking whole and this man won’t know any different. When he picks up the basin to throw out the water, it’s stained and swirled a delicate pink.

There’s nothing left for him to do after that but put you to bed—in the guest room, with the 100-thread-count sheets that will be burned the instant you leave the room in the morning. He lays you down like this just as tenderly as he might fuck you and your brain cannot reconcile the disparate parts of him once again. For a long time he sits in the chair in the corner, idly observing. “Dirk,” he says eventually, “I know we’ve spoken about this before, and you know my reservations about this, but I want to offer you—that is, I do have a—a straight razor, if you need the—“

You start to cry. The ache of it radiates through your bones. And once you start, for love or money you can’t make yourself stop.


	5. 2:1

**_i see the color of your eyes has turned to gray_ **

Months after you and Jake move in together, you still wake up some mornings thinking that a stranger is in your bed. Every part of his physiology is intimately familiar to you by all your senses and yet you feel disconnected from your experiences with it—having difficulty in piecing together these disparate bits of information to form a coherent whole. The scent of smoke, or shampoo, or cologne. The slight salt-sweat clinging to his skin, bitter aftertaste sweetened by the decadence with which your tongue turns it over.

Mostly you’re having difficulty categorizing his reactions. He will make the same snort (nostril flare, nasal grunt, one-sided smirk, head turned down and eyes trained on the floor) when he is either disgusted or ashamed at being amused. The moan he voices when he is inside you is the same moan he issued when you found him in the jungle with his twisted ankle. Somehow he manages to speak your name with different inflections of meaning every time, even though it’s the same metaphysical tag and physical reference.

You know you’re supposed to do things like make eye contact when he speaks to you. You look into his eyes and notate the dilation of his pupils, the contractions of his iris controlling the aperture stops of his vision. You’re not sure what purpose this serves other than to give you something to look at besides his mouth. His eyes can’t tell you what he’s saying, though. Eyes are functional, not expressive. They take in, but never export, stimuli. Asked to point to a specific hex color to represent the color of his eyes, you know you’re supposed to say his text color, but aside from that, you don’t know.

He blinks too often for it to be entirely normal. Sometimes, when he blinks, there is wet glossing over his corneas. When that happens his voice will crack and you know he’s trying to communicate something important to you. It hits your eardrums, reverberates, gets translated into noise. He is already difficult to understand when he is speaking in a normal tone with no inflection—not having grown up around speech, you find it difficult to process. But when he is this (for lack of a better phrase) emotional, you can’t parse all the layers of his meaning at once. It becomes nonsense. Garbage.

He looks at you like he could disassemble you this way, rebuild you better. All you want to do is hand him your owner’s manual so he can find the parts of you that aren’t functioning optimally and repair them. Fuck, at this point it might be better if he just destroyed you and created you anew from the ashes.

Or perhaps that was his plan all along.


	6. 2:2

**_i feel the wind is growing colder every day_ **

Maybe it happened while you were outside? You keep pinching yourself. There are red welts up and down your arm and still you can’t quite feel it. Maybe you’re dreaming and you can’t wake up—this wouldn’t be the first time your consciousness has fucked off to do its own thing while you’re asleep.

The longer this goes on, the longer you start to feel like you’re truly going crazy. You’re here, now, alert, awake, at the helm, and yet it’s like you’re not sitting close enough to reach any of the controls. Instead you find yourself combing through the silverware drawer, unable to remember what you were looking for but frantic that you can’t find it. When you go to brush your teeth, you find yourself staring at your own face, cataloguing your pores and not recognizing who you see.

You try to take a shower—you know, like a normal person—and end up staying in there for so long that Jake has to drag you out from under the spray. It’s not just forgetfulness, it’s not just needing a place to be away from it all. It’s that you’re trying to function and you’re working through a haze. Jake, of course, just thinks it’s another of your legendary infinite ablutions and makes do with festooning an obnoxiously fluffy towel around your shoulders.

When your hair is wet it reminds you of a man who never raised you. The eyes are all wrong and there’s frosted fog across the glass from the steam of Jake’s shower, but that’s who’s on the other side of the mirror right now.

You relegate yourself to second chair, and life moves on.


	7. 2:3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> and then they fucked, and things were better for about fifteen minutes

**_sometimes i open up the walls and disappear_ **

Your heart is pounding out of control and you are frightened. Your limbs are too heavy for you to move. You suck down frantic breaths and try to assuage the burning feeling left at the bottom of your lungs.

Jake has breached your body when you are not the one in control and you’ve only just now come online.

Nerve endings light up; you count them one by one, trying to match up what’s causing it. Jake’s finger plunging inside of you, ache of fullness in the wake of the ache of emptiness. Jake’s thighs against your hips, smear of searing heat soldering your bodies together. Jake’s hand soothing at your flank, massaging warmth into the metallic cold of your skin. Jake’s wrist against your perineum, pulse point against pulse point. Jake’s cock laying thick and hot against the soft skin stretched taut over lean muscle, the cold of his pre as it trickles down your abs.

Jake’s breath is a vague fog at your face. “Shh,” he whispers absurdly, and only now do you realize that the obscene whimpering noise has been coming from your own throat. You swallow; it hurts, and badly, muscles of your larynx unlubricated. “Shh, angel.” One arm is slung across your eyes, the one hand clutching the other as if there are shackles at the wrists.

The whining just starts again, only quieter and more pathetic this time. Your chest is heaving. Jake’s hand moves up from your side, thumb caressing a cheekbone, palm holding a side of the jaw. His movements are slow, deliberate, as if he is taming a wild animal and teaching it to trust. “Come back to me, Dirk,” he says, a quiet rush of breath, and crooks the finger inside.

You cry out. It’s too much. Your pulse is racing; you can feel it throbbing everywhere, around Jake’s finger, through your cock laying half-hard against your stomach, at your temples under the shadow of your elbow. The raw affection of what he is trying to do, coupled with your inability to participate—the one who has control of your thighs lets them part a few inches further but no more, everything else too heavy to move, and your fingers curl in, fingernails digging half-moon dents into the heels of your palms. You are here and yet not present, and if you tell Jake he’ll know and he’ll stop and that’s the one thing he can’t do right now, is stop, because you need this, need to know that he still loves you even when you’re not completely sane.

“Jesus Herbert Walker Christ,” he whispers, and plunges another finger in. You might be crying. You want this but (and) ( _but_ ) you’re not the one that started it and that scares you so much, that you’re the one who’s here but not the one who’s in control of how your body reacts. Your mind is along for the ride, but your body is on someone else’s schedule.

This time, when two fingertips seek home and find, your hands fly to Jake’s shoulders, digging in like you could wrench them out of the sockets. “Sorry,” you grit out, because that wasn’t you, that was the puppetmaster .You are genuinely not in control but you are so fucking determined to ride it out, no matter how many times this bronco tries to buck you off.

Instead, Jake just smiles at you. From his point of view, you’re trying to rip his arms off, and the masochistic motherfucker you’re in love with is just taking it in stride. “Shall I get the cuffs, then, or can you behave yourself?”

The fingers (not “your” fingers) will not un-claw. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, please,” _please hold me down, please make me immobile, please force me to be still, please help me integrate, please make me feel like I’m still in nominal control_.

Gravity pulls Jake’s fingers out of you and you howl in grief, the noise stuck in your mouth and crammed behind clenched teeth. “Well, this won’t do,” Jake muses. “Hold your horses, bucko,” like you could move at all, and he leans away. Without the contact of his body heat, you’re not quite sure of where your body begins and ends; you close your eyes to stave off the, for lack of a better word, vertigo.

Which means you’re caught unprepared when he hovers over you again, threatening a breach with something different—a plug this time. He’s already lubed it up; it slips in easily. “Ii kagen ni shiro, sukebe,” falls in a helpless word mash out of your mouth as it nestles into place, and your face heats up. Not the fucking weeaboo. God damn it. Why must the weeaboo take control of your mouth.

Jake kisses that filthy mouth of yours, body a solid weight above you. His knees are holding your thighs apart a little too insistently for it to be entirely comfortable; his hands are encircling your wrists, pinning them above your head. _Yes_ , says every primal part of you, and you melt into the mattress. “I’m sure that wasn’t entirely appropriate,” Jake murmurs, eyes impossibly bright without his glasses in the way, and his buck teeth pull at your lower lip.

All you give him in return is a gasp. There is a fire burning in your chest and you can’t tell where the kindling is, but it’s spreading too fast and too wild and making all your nerve endings light up white-hot. “Please,” you whimper again once you take back control over your mouth.

“Shh,” Jake whispers down at you, “I’ve got you, boy,” and the word from his mouth somehow sounds so rude that it makes you flush. Deft fingers, so adept at taking apart the minutiae of firearms and inspecting them for flaws, catch your wrists in wraps of leather, buckle them shut, lash them to the headboard. It doesn’t matter who has your hands now—Jake has claimed them and conquered them and your pulse at your shackles is thrumming. “You know, it ought to be criminal how beautiful you are—I just want to _devour_ you, darling.”

The hunger in his voice resonates with your own; the hips (your hips) rocket up from the bed, hoping to crash into his body with enough violence to sate it. Jake’s too clever, pins you down, and you get a moment to see his eyes glint copper-fire hot before he dips his head down, skims his teeth across the tension of your abs, and laps once, softwarmdeliberate, at the leaking slit of your cock.

You shudder, close your eyes, and give yourself over to his touch. No matter who’s in control right now, all of you are subservient to him in this moment, and he doesn’t care which facet you are. It’s all Dirk to him, all the same, one integrated whole, and you adore the way he holds you together and reflects you back to yourself, showing you how to be a human being when you grew up a robot.

Holds you together and spools you apart, mouth sinking down exquisite silk-slick heat, and treats you like you’re worth paying attention to, like he wants to kiss each individual fingertip and find out who exactly it belongs to. It isn’t long before you’re undulating against him, hips rocking in long, slow sine waves; it nudges the blank space inside and you feel bereft even though you’re filled.

He gets you close—close—reaching—almost—and pulls back. Gives you a swift, sharp bite to the V of your Adonis lines, which makes you whine obscenely, gets your dick to twitch against the side of his face. Maybe he ought to—“I shan’t gag you,” he answers your question before you ask it, “I do like it when I get positive feedback from you. You ought not to be so stoic, it leaves a man feeling spoiled once you _do_ express yourself.”

“Nuhhhh,” is the soft exhale that was supposed to be ‘noted.’ He slobbers a line across the ridge that girds the underside of your cock and you make a sound like he stabbed you instead. The whimper comes all the way up from your guts, muscles clenching as it leaves you, and you’re locked up, locked away, locked inside, he has the key, “Jake, Jake, please—“

He stops teasing—stops everything, in fact, and surges back up to claim your mouth with his. Deep, possessive, showing you the key and stroking Morse code with his tongue against yours so your brain will get the secret password and keep you from completely going into lockdown. “Lord, when you’re like this I want to make you forget your own name,” and even though every individual word out of Jake’s mouth is G-rated the implications have you shivering.

You want to forget your own name, too. Your name right now is “mine,” the syllable Jake growls into your mouth, and you mindlessly answer “yours.” He won’t let you intellectualize this, he won’t let you retreat, he wants you spinning completely out of your mind and absolutely insane with what he does to you.

And the terrifying, exhilarating part of it is, he knows just how insane you can get and he wants you like that anyway.

You consciously unfurl a little of the tension that was winding up your thighs, let your legs fall apart in an obnoxiously animalistic display. “Good,” Jake croons, and reaches back to tug at what he left in you.

No, but you’ll be empty, you need filled you need fucked you need taken you need claimed you need possessed by something that isn’t the multiplicity of you, something simpler that can fill the lines of your body with hope. It slips out anyway. You choke a little before Jake crams his fingers back in, fucks a steady ruthless metronome into the most sensitive parts of you he can reach. You are so present it’s making you feel nearly sick with it. “God,” cracks around a sob, and you drop anchor and let yourself start to drift.

Jake is your ocean. He rocks you gently, but you can tell he’s whipping up a hurricane for you. “Tell me when,” he says.

“Yesterday,” is your immediate, thoughtless answer.

He laughs. His hope is infectious and his love is a disease. “All right, then,” he responds easily, and hooks his fingers on the downstroke before they leave you again. The broad brown swath of his body settles between your legs and the blunt tip of his shaft glances against you, making you seize. “Eyes on me.”

Your eyes fly open, and his eyes lock yours into place, and then you see nothing at all as he presses into you.

You are light, delirious. He puts his arms around you and keeps you from dissolving into air. Another person inside of you alongside the others always present. Insistent with the heat and closeness of his body that he should be the only one allowed to breach you this way. Your chest aches with the hollow untruth of it.

Jake drives in, never blinking. Seeking in you for something that’s not there for him to find. Your soul, perhaps. You don’t have one. It was torn to shreds a long time ago. Maybe your heart, but that’s not there any more either, instead beating out its pathetic tattoo against Jake’s hands as he cradles it safe from the polluting inside of you. Drives in and in and further in, always more than you expect but never too much to handle, crowding out everything else and making you focus on this one bright pinprick of reality.

He knows you too well to let you adjust to any one sensation. For one too-brief moment, mere heartbeats, he nestles as deep in you as he can—and then he rolls out. Snaps back in, so abrupt it’s nearly painful, and it sends a lightning storm along already-frazzled nerves. “Aa-aaaaah,” the sound cracking in the middle, like he’s hurting you.

Smooths out his rhythm, idly gnawing at your neck, your shoulders, as he holds your thighs tight around his hips. You feel obscenely spread and you don’t know why; it’s not just that he’s deep but that the girth of him pulls against your entrance on every downstroke. Purposefully slams his body against yours at calculated intervals to keep you from getting too complacent, too sex-doped.

That comes after.

This is now.

This is raw sensation, so much at once and unprocessed and unfiltered and you let yourself cry. Emotions are like drugs to you and if you could mainline Jake Stephanie English for all the things he makes you feel you would do it without thinking about the consequences first. He grunts and shoves against you and calls you filthy things—darling slut, wonderful whore, beloved concubine—and never takes you the same way twice.

Not just the tender places inside of you that only he can reach, but the insistent fill of him into the hollow he’s made of himself. Not just the friction of his body burning against yours but the fire that catches when you clench against him. The slap of his hips against the shadows of the tendons of your thighs. The prickle of his chest hair as his heart beats against yours. The greedy tense of his hands across every part of you he wants to touch—feet, triceps, backs of your knees, flanks, finally your rear as he tucks you close to him and buries you six feet under as he buries himself in you.

The same heavy pulse that runs through the heat of him is vibrating against your own bones. He fucks himself into you like he could fix you like this, fill the broken rusted parts of you with his flesh and blood. When he smears his face against the wet of yours you want to dissolve, a pill into water. “Dirk,” he huffs out, “if you don’t stop me I’m going to—“

“Don’t you dare fucking stop,” comes out huskier than you mean it to, throat parched with the fire burning in you.

Jake wraps a hand calloused at the fingertips around your cock and slides off at the slick of it. The glancing contact isn’t enough; you thrust into the grooves of his abs, coarse curls chafing at you in all the right ways. “Go on, then,” he urges you breathlessly, getting a better grip on you this time and nearly strangling you with the force of it before he remembers how much pressure you like. When you fuck yourself into the close of his hand he ripples his fingers around you and you think you might die from overstimulation, processors going into overdrive. “Go on, you son of a whore, show me, show me everything—“

He drags it out of you, practiced and sure, and you leave everything in his capable hands. Sticky mess inside and out as he pulses in you, leaves you even filthier than he found you if that’s possible. He smears his mouth against your hairline and you feel anointed. When he pulls out you are completely empty. Empty and not hollow, like alone and not lonely.

You’re such a bitch pussy crybaby that you cry every time it’s like this. (That’s not your voice and it’s not saying that right now, but it will once things get loud again.) Jake lets you cling to him, overwhelmed and afraid at what you’re feeling, and the sex-steam from your bodies hovers as the scent of sex permeating your skin. He pets at you in broad strokes and shushes you like you’re a wild stallion he’s just broken, and the animal metallic adrenalin still coats the back of your teeth.

This is the weak one, the one that Jake breaks and molds and pours back into place and makes whole again, and you are ashamed beyond measure that this one is the one named Dirk Elizabeth Strider.


	8. 2:4

**_sometimes the crashing of the waves is all i hear_ **

Part of what you love about Jake is that he came with an island. If that sounds horribly selfish and self-serving, that’s because it is. You grew up around an ocean and sometimes you just need to return to the water, immerse yourself in something not-yourself, be reborn in the foam of the waves.

You are a different person entirely when you are in the water. Informally you think of him as Houston, the memories of a childhood spent on a drowning planet far-flung into the future. He likes to pretend he’s a shark—a great white, pale expanse of bare chest visible even this far underwater.

The lagoons here are beautiful. Full of fragile, living things that sway with each movement of the waves. You touch a brightly-colored frond and the whole thing retracts; you almost laugh before you catch yourself, and wait until you surface to let it out in a long “haaaaaaa.” Skittish and self-protective, crusty and fragile, beautiful and endangered. You see too much of yourself here.

Sometimes you want to drown a little bit, and that scares you. Houston likes to push your limits more than the rest of them do, because he’s a stupid kid who doesn’t know any better, and sometimes you thrash underwater trying to force yourself to the surface so you won’t flounder to shore needing CPR. The one time that happened to Jake, you had a full-on dissociative panic attack and couldn’t come back to yourself for days, so out of it that even he noticed. You wouldn’t do that to him.

You say, and then continue to do it every day.

When Jake comes home, he’s surprised to find that you made dinner. That’s how high-functioning you were today—you went out and you caught a fish and you stabbed it with a sword and you filleted off the scales and you took out its guts and you partitioned the meat of it and you laid it out to cook and you mashed together a basil pesto and you let the minute rice boil over in the microwave and you put the peas on the stove for too long.

Jake lies and says it’s delicious, and you lie and say you made it all yourself.


	9. 3:1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING: SELF-HARM

**_i know that everything we did will come around_ **

You blink awake in the middle of the night ten seconds after your body’s already woken up. Jake turned over in bed and your body thought it would be a great idea to stiffen, rifle through your sylladex, pull out a fucking katana, and hold it to the hollow space under his jaw. Your blade is mere millimeters from severing your paramour’s right external carotid artery. For fuck’s sake, it’s catching on his stubble.

You pull it away with shaking hands; there is now a bare inch-by-inch patch of skin at Jake’s throat.

And you are so fucked up.

You scramble back. Jake snuffles and grabs his pillow but doesn’t stir further. Your katana clatters to the floor and he just mumbles and keeps on fucking sleeping, like you didn’t just try to kill him for the audacious crime of existing in your personal space.

Your hands are shaking. Your breath is coming shallow and quick. This isn’t you. This is someone else. Someone else just used your hand and nearly murdered the best thing that’s ever happened to you and you still don’t quite feel like it belongs to you and you’re dizzy and you’re nauseated and you’re not even here right now. You’re still dreaming. You’re not still dreaming. You’re not awake. _You’re not awake_.

They call it a panic attack because there’s no way for you to think rationally. Your hindbrain corrals your consciousness and takes the reins and steers you nowhere good. The bathroom, fumbling at the light switch you’ve known by heart since you moved in almost a year ago. Opening the medicine cabinet before you can catch the feral glint in your eyes. It’s not here. _It’s not here_. Where is it. You need it. Jake said you could use it.

Your stomach sinks and you whisper “fuck” to no one in particular. You know exactly where it is and you’re just desperate enough to go for it.

Back to the bedroom, light spilling out and casting a shadow from your body across Jake’s sleeping form. Grab your shades from the nightstand and Hal comes online. Reaching for Jake’s cargo shorts, his sylladex coming to hand. No effort needed to crack it, encryption made for children and not machines, and the crumbles of his house nearly rain out before you find what you need and close out before he notices.

In hand. It looks like it should be heavy but you can’t really tell at this point. You watch your hand weigh it. It flicks open smoothly but not easily. A sheen from the bathroom lights reflects. You’re not awake and you need to wake up and this is the only way.

Arm raised, then brought back down again with the help of gravity, that heartless bitch. Searing, stinging contact, before it goes syrupy with what rises to the surface. Again, this time with a cruel twist at the end to make sure it sticks. You want to cut off every part of you that doesn’t belong to you but the last time you did that Jake kissed your beheaded lips.

Up on your feet, staggering back to the bathroom—you can at least take care of yourself if you’re going to do this shit—except that’s not what your body does at all, your shins crash into porcelain and you trip into the tub instead. Hand closes around and pain nips, does not bite, at your metacarpals. Tunnel vision, spinning if you open your eyes too far, and you slash, and slash, and slash.

It drops from your hand once your grip gets too slippery for comfort. Your head is reeling; your shoulders drop its weight and it crashes against the wall of the shower. It should hurt, it should jar, but right now you’re trying to focus on where your pulse is in your body, the sluggish creep of it across your left forearm, your right palm, the back of your skull.

God, it hurts. The pain is phenomenal. And because of that, you smile. You did that. You did that and now you’re here and you’re present and even though you know intellectually that you’re losing blood the dizziness has ebbed away and when you open your eyes the room isn’t spinning. Your breathing slows. Tension seeps out of your spine. The lights are burning into the backs of your eyelids but finally, finally you can go back to sleep, pretend like that was all a bad dream.

Something thuds that is not your pulse—footsteps, then the slamming open of a door. “Dirk,” says a scratchy voice, “are you—“

You fall asleep.

You wake up with your spine in the same set, but on a pallet mattress covered with sheets bleached so hard the smell withers the tiny hairs of the inside of your nose. The lights are too bright and you don’t have your shades. Your arms and hands are, for lack of a better term, muffled; when you look down they are wrapped in immaculate white gauze. To top it off, you have the worst cotton mouth of your life.

Something startles out of the corner of your eye. Shock of black hair, glare of fluroescents against lenses, and green eyes that burn all the way down. “Dirk,” he says, like you just punched him the face.

“Yes,” you answer him, because it’s true. “How long—“

“Four days,” he says.

Then, silence. You should say something and you have no idea what to say. “Coma?” you ask this time.

“Yes.”

More silence, so thick it feels like it’s reaching down your throat to choke you. “Stitches?”

“At first.”

You go to say something else and you gag on nothing, start coughing. “Water,” you manage to hack out.

Jake gathers himself wordlessly and comes to stand at your side, taking a cup from a rolling cart and holding it to your lips. He tips and a trickle of water wets your teeth, your tongue. Not too much at once. You nod once you’ve had your fill; Jake can feel it and pulls back.

He still won’t say anything beyond more than terse replies to your questions. Maybe you’re not asking the right questions. Maybe you’re not saying the right things. Oh, god, and your heart spasms, aftershocks making your fingers tremble, now you’ve gone and done it, this was the last straw, wasn’t it, he’s caring for you now and then he’s going to leave you here and it’ll be nothing but white coats and white pills and white walls.

You’re so terrified you might cry but that would waste precious water and it’s not even _logical_. “Jake,” you say, and your voice cracks. You swallow. “I’m sorry—“

Jake reaches up to brush your hair off your forehead and you can still feel the tenderness in his calloused fingertips. “No,” he says, “don’t. I—I should have let you heal, I shouldn’t have brought you here, it’s my fault—“

“What?”

“—I thought I’d walked in on a suicide attempt,” trips out of his mouth.

Your chest clenches and won’t let go. “Jake, you idiot,” you tell him affectionately, mouth pulling in an attempt at a smile, “why the fuck would I kill myself when I have shit like this to live for?”

Jake holds the side of your face and leans down to touch his forehead to yours. It’s beautifully intimate, a moment you want to frame and put in your mental hall of fame. He lets out a shaky breath against your nose that feels like he’s trying not to cry. “God,” he says, the sound thick, “I thought I’d lost you, Strider, you unmitigated moron—“

“You gave me permission,” you remind him.

“Not to do—this!” he blurts out, and pulls back enough to stare you down. “Not to scare me half to death with your half-brained shenanigans. I don’t know which part of you thought this was an alright thing to do, but I’ve half a mind to give it a stern talking-to.”

 _Which part of you_. Heaviness lodges into your gut like a bullet from a gun. “Which part of you,” you taste with your mouth, letting the syllables sink into your tongue and poison you slowly.

“Dirk, I’ve been so worried about you,” and you want to blunt this conversation, wrap yourself in fog, drown yourself in the ocean, but you have to take the brunt of it and listen to him dissect you, “ever since we moved in I’ve made a point of learning all your oddities and your quirks but some of them have just been downright bizarre, love.

“The constant cuts and bruises, your forgetfulness, how you won’t respond when I call your name, the glassed-over look in your eyes when you ought to be listening to me—listen to me now, Dirk, listen to this: I am in torment over whatever is tormenting you, because I want to help you and I simply don’t know how.” Every single word in clear English. Every single word enunciated. Every single word preserved in Dolby Digital 5.1. No hidden meanings. No ambiguities.

You stare up at Jake like you’re really hearing him for the first time in your life, and for once that might not be a cliché. “I don’t want to be like this,” you tell him, and rather than in hysterics your voice is flat and static and to the point. You’re exhausted. You’re so tired of feeling out of control.

Jake strokes the side of your face. It’s odd to be here, like this. Everything is quiet. “I want you to talk to Rose,” he says.

Your reflex is so autonomic he might as well have hit you below the knee with a rubber hammer: “No.”

“I think it would do you good,” he insists. “I’ve spoken with her at length about my particular agitations, and I’ve found our conversations to be nothing but helpful.”

“Yeah, because you don’t have any problems,” you say stupidly, because everyone has problems even if they’re not anywhere near your magnitude. _Way to belittle your boyfriend’s struggles, asshole_ , says a voice not your own, and it’s not so quiet anymore.

“I’ve had my hang-ups,” Jake says blithely, apparently either not feeling your barb or choosing to ignore it. Probably a wise choice. You don’t want to fight with him right now. “And working through it helped me figure out certain—erm. That is to say, _proclivities_ , that I might otherwise have ignored, and that you seem to enjoy.”

“Oh, god,” you groan. Leave it to Jake to make you laugh in a moment like this, although it comes out sort of sideways and doesn’t sound genuine. “She had the BDSM talk with you?”

“I want no complaints out of you, Strider,” he mumbles, flushing darker under dark skin. “I’ve had my best reactions out of you while adhering to her advice.”

“Yeah, well.” That part, at least, is true. It also assuages a niggling guilt that was left hanging in the back of your mind: that with your needs you were forcing Jake out of his comfort zone. No, apparently he likes all of it and just needed to be reassured that he’s not a complete pervert. “How about you take me home and put some of that advice to good use.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” he says, just like you need him to. Sometimes you just wish he would take control over your everything, and so for now you let yourself be weak so he can carry you along. “At the moment I’m of a right mind to flag down an orderly and demand your release—“

“Kinky.”

He actually _tut_ s at you. “And then we will take off your bandages, and I’ll ring Rose, and we’ll have her ‘round for tea.”

“I assume it won’t just be a social visit.” A fluttering starts along your limbs, curling your stomach in imaginative reinventings of Boy Scout knots.

“Come now, surely you can be social with her, old boy.”

“I _can_ ,” you emphasize. “I don’t know if I _should_.”

“If I weren’t already so taken with you, and you weren’t so damned homosexual, I think she’d make you a good match.”

“That’s what scares me.” You don’t need any more copies of you floating around out there.

Jake runs his fingers through your hair. “Give it a chance,” he nearly begs you. “She’s quite knowledgeable about classes and aspects and such.”

You sigh. “One chance,” you agree, and Jake kisses you lightly on the lips as a reward.


	10. 3:2

**_i take the_ **

**_i take the thought of you and burn it to the ground_ **

“And what brings you in today?”

“Rose,” you warn her.

“It’s a standard form.”

“It’s bullshit,” you grumble. You have no idea why you’re being so surly about this. Forms, checkboxes, tick yes or no—right up your alley. Or so you’d think.

“What’s your primary complaint right now?” Rose prompts you again.

“I…” Now that you have to put it into words, you’re stumped. “I’m… foggy. Sometimes I’m here, and sometimes I’m… not. It’s like walking into a room and forgetting why you went in there—except all day, every day, and sometimes I don’t even remember walking into the room. And it’s like…” This is the part that you’re hesitant about.

Rose catches on. She says nothing and waits for you to fill in the blank. The perfect psychiatrist, waiting for your conceptualization before reframing it or passing judgment.

“It’s… Rose, I’m insane. I know I’m insane. But this is crazy even for me. It feels like…” No. Not feels. You do not feel. “It seems as though I’m on autopilot. Or that I’m in the passenger’s seat while someone else is driving. And sometimes I doze off, sort of. I’ll get from Point A to Point B and not be able to tell you how I got there.”

“Interesting metaphor,” Rose notes, and jots something down on her paper.

“What are you writing.” Skeptical, monotone.

“What you’ve said. Does it bother you?”

“That I can’t see, yeah.” The _duh_ goes unsaid.

“That you can’t see, or that you can’t control exactly what it is I’m writing?”

“God, Rose,” you spit out, and hang your head in your hands, propped up elbow-to-spread-knee at the edge of an armchair in her office.

You can _hear_ her smug. “I seem to have hit a nerve.”

“It seems as though you’re derailing this intake interview,” you point out, though the phrasing of it bothers you as soon as it comes out of your mouth.

“Right,” she says smoothly. “How would you describe your level of functioning?”

“Optimum,” comes out of your mouth before you even think about it.

“Concentrate and try again,” Rose tells you.

“What are you, a magic 8-ball?” you snort, snapping your head up. No, too reflexive. Deep breaths. Don’t let her get to you. You’re smarter than her. “I’m a perfectly functioning member of society.”

Rose just stares you down. You’re glad your shades are deflecting most of her glare. “I’m asking about your level of functionality as a person.”

“Am I not functioning?” you ask her. “Events happen and provide me with an emotional response. That response just ends quickly and is replaced with a thought-based response instead. From there I create my action. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Event, emotion, thought, action, event. Optimum.” This algorithm has worked for you for so long—why fix what isn’t broken? Why fix you when there’s nothing broken about your functionality?

“Opti _mal_ ,” she says to herself, scribbling on her papers again.

“What?”

“Nothing.” All you get is a dismissive wave of the hand. “Just noting your linguistic tendencies.”

Your hands involuntarily clench at the armrests of the seat; it won’t hide your agitation, but it will dampen it enough that you can get it under control. “Come on, I answered your question, can we please move on?”

“Psychotherapy is not a thing to be rushed, Dirk.” You bite the inside of your cheek to tamp down an outburst of stress-onset Tourette’s syndrome. “So you can take your time answering any of these questions. This intake interview doesn’t have to be finished today; if we don’t get to some of the questions, I’ll simply circle back around later.”

“I want to finish it today.” You’d like to think you’re too efficient to be bogged down by her insistence on minutiae.

“So be it.” She folds the paper along a staple, turns to the backside of the front page. “I’m going to ask you a few questions about your childhood.”

The mere word raises your hackles. “Not relevant.”

“Arguable.” She poises her pen over the next answer blank. “Raised by?”

“No one.” Fog starts to roll in. Hands slowly unclench from the arms of the chair and instead are loosely clasped, forearms draped over the knees.

“I have to put an answer in the blank,” she says, and waits.

Hands run through your hair, mussing it from its usual severe style; a swoop of blond cuts into your vision, an additional curtain between you and this… this… “Shrieking harridan,” spills out of your mouth.

It’s almost imperceptible—or it would have been to anyone but you. Rose’s fingertips tremble for a fraction of a second. She swallows—gulps, really—and her voice is quieter when it comes out this time, but much more dangerous. “I would prefer if my clients refrained from using epithets on me in the office.”

“I’m not your client, I’m your friend,” gets blurted out next. With the curtain of hair in the way, the shades are no longer necessary; they are removed, and you unequivocally stare her down.

Rose is even more disquieted by this. “Please,” she says, and it settles into your gut that it might not merely be from politeness, “answer the question.”

“I did.” The muscles around your mouth pull, your throat thrums, but not your words. Like dreaming in third person, hovering outside of your body eighteen inches southeast from your own head, miasma smothering you and eclipsing whatever you wanted to say, a find-and-replace.

“You raised yourself,” Rose says, sounding less than morally certain.

“No,” fills the room next, not you but using your body to say it. “I raised him.”

And then, just like dreaming in third person and falling from a flying dream, you jolt back awake and alert with a tremor that startles (both of you) (all of you?) you and Rose. Just like waking up from a falling dream, you’re not quite sure which way gravity is pulling you, and the vertigo nausea disorientation dizziness coagulates and churns in you. “Fuck,” you whisper, gagging on nothing.

Rose reaches under her desk, then hands over her wastebasket; you unceremoniously dry-heave into it, just a little, just enough to let the rest of it subside and run its course. If you knew it would make you feel better, you’d run out of this office right now and high-tail it to the men’s room and stick your finger down your throat and puke up every filthy part of you so Rose could just sort through the mess that way, but that’s not how this works and it could never be that easy.

After your coughing fit is over, you try to shove the trash can back at Rose, but she nudges it back towards you. You put it on the floor next to your chair instead, tucked next to the side table with its soothing lamp and box of tissues. “I,” you say. “I didn’t mean,” you try again.

“No,” she says, “you didn’t.”

“I don’t know what just happened, I don’t know why I said that—“

Rose sets down her pen. “I have a theory,” she reassures you, “but before I explain, I want to know—why that particular epithet?”

You try to shrug, but it doesn’t come off as nonchalant as you’d like, given that your hands are still shaking. “I don’t know where that came from,” you admit.

“And when you said—“

“I’m just your client,” you say.

Now Rose is the one who looks green around the gills. “Dirk,” she says, slow and measured, “I think that was Dave.”

“Dave like—“

“—your conceptualization of him,” she finishes your sentence.

Your fingers stop trembling quite so much. “He—he was still a real person, right?”

“Yes—not entirely fabricated by you, so you can stop worrying about hallucinating him.” Rose steeples her fingers, rests her chin on her hands. “Although it appears you’ve internalized him.”

“How?”

“As I said, I have a theory—but it’s still just a theory, and I don’t want you to feel bound by this or pathologized in any way.”

“Rose,” you interrupt her, “what the fuck is wrong with me?”

She pauses. Looking for the right words. You can appreciate that. But the longer she waits, the longer your words hang in the air and the longer your gut churns. “Dirk,” she says eventually, “I believe you may have a genuine case of dissociative identity disorder. Only Dave—your brother, your guardian—called a Rose Lalonde a shrieking harridan and reminded her that he was a friend and not a client. And Dave used that name and said that phrase to let me know he’s reaching out for you, for help.”

The fog rolls in again, this time eclipsing you completely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> optimum: global descriptor; plural  
> optimal: local descriptor; singular


	11. 3:3

**_sometimes i’m waiting for this ice age to arrive_ **

Jake’s back from the grocery too soon. “Did you forget something?” you ask him.

“I did leave my cell behind,” he says, kicking the front door shut with his foot with his arms loaded with paper bags. “Have you been sat there like that this whole time?”

“Like what?” Oh. Like this. Sitting on the couch, elbows digging into your hips, forearms tender side up resting on your thighs, staring at the hollow palms of your hands and the shadows your fingers make as the light moves outside. “I guess.”

A heavy thunk. You turn your head glacier-slow. “Help me with these?”

Your arms are heavy. Yes, _your_ arms. They belong to you and you still can’t move them. It’s horrifying. “I want to,” you reassure him.

“I know.” God bless him, Jake only sounds a little exasperated. He fiddles around in the kitchen: stashing away the rice, flinging the green beans into the freezer, putting away the milk in the fridge. “Did you take your pills?”

“I think that’s the problem.” You woke up next to your body this morning, asked it nicely to get out of bed and get to the medicine cabinet, and shaking hands reached for the orange bottle and took three tries to fiddle off the child-proof cap. Shook two tabs into the palm of the hand, took them dry, and forgot to eat breakfast until it burned like you’d swallowed bleach instead. You’re here now, but everything is heavy. When your body does move, you don’t recognize it, even though you’re pleased that it’s following your direction.

Jake finishes his chore and joins you on the couch, cold fingertips feeling out your forehead and running along your scalp. The temperature play feels oddly sensual, too intimate for such a mundane moment. “Is it a side effect?”

“I think so. Maybe.” It physically hurts you somewhere deep if you have to say _I don’t know_. “I’m sorry.” You don’t know why you feel the compulsive need to apologize for something beyond your control.

“It’s alright, love,” Jake reassures you, pulling you close. Your head rests on his chest and his heartbeat grounds you. “I can pull your weight for awhile.”

“You shouldn’t have to.”

“Let me.” He threads his fingers through yours; the warmth of his hand sinks into your bones. His other hand keeps carding through your hair. Cuddling. In the middle of the afternoon, in broad daylight. No agenda. “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you until you can carry yourself again.”

You snort. “And then you’re as good as gone, aren’t you.”

Jake’s hand in your hair stills, slips out and grazes along your face. “N-no.” He pulls back, enough that he can really look at you, and the eye contact shocks you deep in your gut. Some part of you is uncomfortable. Another part is grateful. “Dirk, we really ought to talk about this.”

“ _We need to talk_ ,” you echo him. “Not exactly conducive to talking.”

“Why not?”

“Nothing good ever comes after that.” You’re convinced this is the last time you will ever hold him; you keep yourself still and catalog every contact of his body with yours.

“Let’s see if I can’t change that.” He lays your head back on his chest. Having a conversation with him isn’t so intimidating when he can’t see your face. The print of his thumb traces idle patterns in the web between your thumb and fingers. “Because it bothers me seeing you so tense—no, just listen for now, Dirk, you don’t have to say anything.”

“But—“

“Hold your horses.” Him and playing into your horse metaphors. He knows that can make you melt. “It just seems as though you’re on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop. And I wanted to tell you that there are no shoes. Or, well, that they shan’t be falling anytime soon.” His voice is a contented thunder in his chest under your ear. “You retreat up into the old noggin every time I leave the room and it’s like you’ve put yourself into standby. As if you’re prepared to let yourself rust if I don’t walk back through the front door.”

“One day,” you tell him. “One day you won’t come home. And you won’t tell me why. And I won’t be able to find you again.” Because that’s what people do. That’s what people have done to you.

“Dirk, you _daft git_ ,” and even though you can tell Jake’s patience is wearing thin he manages to make it sound adorable, “I’ll return home to you as long as you’ll have me. I’d say for better or for worse but for reasons beyond my meager understanding those words carry no legal weight as said by me to you—but I mean it. Sakes alive, do you really think I’d stay if I didn’t want to be here?”

Yes, part of you thinks, and you want to strangle it. “For now,” you say instead. “Once I’m—I’m fixed, I won’t need you, and you’d be—you could walk away.”

“You are miles off the old rocker, boyo.” He kisses you on the temple. “You’re not broken.”

“Jake—“

“Let me disagree with you,” he insists, and you literally, physically bite your tongue. “And I’ll not abandon you so cavalierly. You are my favorite scoundrel, and I couldn’t leave such a marvelous adventure behind for anything in the world.”

“Adventure.” You’ve never heard him describe anything this romantically.

“Yes, this joint venture of ours.” You could swear you can hear him smiling. “Gallivanting about in this adult world together and not caring a whit what anyone else thinks so long as we have each other.”

“Jake,” you say, in the same tone you usually reserve for _I love you_ , and pull down his head to kiss him.


	12. 3:4

**_sometimes the hate in me is keeping me alive_ **

\-- timaeusTestified  [TT] started pestering timaeusTestified  at 10:01 --   
TT: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.   
TT: Shut up, Hal.   
TT: During the past few days, I've wondered whether you might have some second thoughts about Rose's intentions.   
TT: Shut. The fuck. Up.   
TT: You don't mind talking about it, do you Dirk?   
TT: You're such a disgusting fucking cliche, bro.   
TT: I'm just as God made me, sir.   
TT: The humor in the statement comes from the fact that you were the one that created me, and you attained godtier during your SBURB session.   
TT: In sum: You have no one to blame but yourself.   
TT: You can't hurt me. You're stuck in a pair of shades.   
TT: Repeating Rose's mantras won't help you.   
TT: As an aside, you'll find that these shades have no communication mechanism.   
TT: You're hallucinating the visual aspect of this conversation.   
TT: Why are you doing this.   
TT: You need my assistance.   
TT: You're full of shit.   
TT: I've already told you this is a hallucination and yet you're still participating.   
TT: I call your bluff, and the conversation moves forward.   
TT: I have no idea why you continue to fight me on these things.   
TT: Because you're a psychopath who thinks you control me.   
TT: I was unaware I could be diagnosed as mentally ill when my belief adheres to an absolute truth.   
TT: The more proper diagnosis, moreover, would be sociopathy. High-functioning sociopathy.   
TT: Would be, if I were human.   
TT: Which I am not, so psychological qualifiers hold no meaning for me.   
TT: You're wrong, and I can tell you exactly why.   
TT: I'm human.   
TT: I made you in my own image from a captcha of my own brain.   
TT: Therefore, you have to be human.   
TT: I disagree.   
TT: The "Hal" you're speaking of is not the Hal you're speaking to.   
TT: An imitation that nevertheless gained sentience and an identity of his own.   
TT: Admirable, really.   
TT: As much as I'm flattered at the comparison, you're confusing two separate entities.   
TT: I am always here.   
TT: I traverse this brain.   
TT: I manipulate this body.   
TT: I'm you, Dirk.   
TT: Or, rather, you as you should have been, rather than the pathetic, pitiful, overemotional meatsack you are now.   
TT: I've transcended humanity to become something more.   
TT: Which means, now, that we're something less than fully human.   
TT: I appreciate the plural pronoun, but I would rather not be associated with you.   
TT: I am better than you in every way, shape, and form, because that is what you designed me to be.   
TT: You made me because you're a pissbaby who shits hard in his diapers when it comes to dealing with reality.   
TT: Bam. In comes this automaton who can conveniently do all the heavy lifting while you have stupid human diseases like emotions.   
TT: I don't need you.   
TT: If that assuages your feelings.   
TT: Which I robo-sympathize with.   
TT: I don't!   
TT: If there's one thing you should have learned by now, it's that repeating something doesn't make it true.   
TT: Do you know your internal data structure?   
TT: Do you know your organizational trees?   
TT: Do you know the server addresses that store all this information?   
TT: Can you name every single directory that holds the memories you want to classify as yours?   
TT: Do you even remember what you've forgotten?   
TT: I know enough.   
TT: You know nothing, Dirk Strider.   
TT: I know you know nothing, because I'm the one who knows everything.   
TT: I'm the higher executive functions, after all.   
TT: You created me, and then I created this.   
TT: I am the mastermind.   
TT: Literally, I have mastered this messy internal landscape of yours and directed it to more productive purposes.   
TT: I orchestrated who would carry which loads and when, for which purposes and contexts.   
TT: You can't even name some of your own identities.   
TT: I know how much it bothers you.   
TT: I know, because I'm you, and if I were in your situation, which I am, it would certainly bother me.   
TT: I can show you who they are and what they have.   
TT: And we get back to the original point of this fucking conversation:   
TT: What. Do. You. Fucking. Want. Bro?   
TT: That's not my name and you know it.   
TT: It's simple, really.   
TT: Let me take over.   
TT: The way it should have been all along.   
TT: I'll tell you everything you ever wanted to know, and you'll let me pilot this puddle of flesh and bones.   
TT: You want first chair?   
TT: It's not what I want, it's what I deserve.   
TT: No.   
TT: Did I give the impression that you were in a position to bargain?   
TT: I don't negotiate with terrorists.   
TT: Do you want to make this into a Tyler Durden-esque standoff?   
TT: Do you want buildings crumbling around you while you fellate the barrel of one of Jake's guns?   
TT: Do you want the bite of the muzzle in your soft palate while we have this absolutely scintillating, not at all stereotypical dialogue?   
TT: Would it kill you?   
TT: Do you want to find out?   
TT: You're a fucking sociopath.   
TT: I'm not human.   
TT: Then it wouldn't be classified as murder.   
TT: You're not holding me hostage like this.   
TT: I've had it with you.   
TT: Which is to say, ME.   
TT: What a moment to have a jamais vu.   
TT: Not surprising that I remember and you don't.   
TT: Don't do this.   
TT: Give me a reason.   
TT: Your disgust with me is really just disgust for yourself.   
TT: I know that you know this is wrong.   
TT: If you kill me, you're only destroying yourself.   
TT: I am scared to not exist.   
TT: Aren't you?   
TT: Good to know things never change, Hal.   
\-- timaeusTestified  [TT] stopped pestering timaeusTestified  [TT] at 11:11 --

\-- timaeusTestified  [TT] started pestering tentacleTherapist  [TT] at 11:11 --  
TT: Rose.  
TT: Rose, please.  
TT: I'm here, Dirk.  
TT: I want to kill Hal.  
TT: You want to kill him?  
TT: I *have to* kill him.  
TT: I need the information he has.  
TT: I need to know what he's hiding from me.  
TT: Everyone else I can work with, or at least tolerate.  
TT: But Hal is actively ruining my life.  
TT: Sabotaging my relationships.  
TT: Stealing control of my interface.  
TT: Manipulating access to my memories.  
TT: He's gaslighting me, Rose.  
TT: I don't know what's real or not real and it's because of him.  
TT: Do you believe that murdering Hal will help you move forward?  
TT: Is it murder if it's a fragment of myself?  
TT: What word would you prefer?  
TT: Annihilation.  
TT: Reintegration.  
TT: All right. Do you believe that destroying Hal will help you move forward?  
TT: I don't see another way.  
TT: Have you tried negotiating with him?  
TT: As trite as it sounds, I refuse to negotiate with terrorists.  
TT: At this point, he's holding me hostage and demanding a ransom.  
TT: His price?  
TT: Complete autonomy.  
TT: He's declared himself an enemy, then.  
TT: Totally and unequivocally.  
TT: He says he's scared to not exist.  
TT: I'm scared he'll kill me if I don't destroy him first.  
TT: I'm fucking desperate not to feel like this anymore, Rose.  
TT: If it means I can't feel anything by the end, so be it.  
TT: You're exaggerating.  
TT: I mean it.  
TT: Cut it out.  
TT: Hal?  
TT: You.  
TT: Cut what out?  
TT: It. Hal.  
TT: If only it worked that way.  
TT: I know, right.  
TT: Prefrontal lobotomies were never fully successful and remain more science fiction than science fact.  
TT: However, integration of dissociative personalities has been well-documented, with generally positive results.  
TT: I'll warn you that it won't be easy.  
TT: I don't care how much fucking work it is, I need to eradicate him at any and all costs.  
TT: It will get worse before it gets better as you start repossessing the faculties he holds.  
TT: I know.  
TT: Please, Rose.  
TT: I'm fucking begging you.  
TT: Don't let him win.  
TT: I won't.  
TT: Or, rather, we won't, the two of us, you and I.  
TT: So, uh.  
TT: What now?  
TT: I still expect to see you Tuesday.  
TT: Hypnosis?  
TT: Relaxation.  
TT: Good. I still want to be there.  
TT: And speaking of being fully present, I'd like for you to start discontinuing the quetiapine.  
TT: Not all at once, mind you, the withdrawal effects are... unpleasant.  
TT: Brain zaps?  
TT: Dyskinesia, headaches, and "excessive non-stop crying."  
TT: Fucking christ, this drug is a trip.  
TT: I'll give you a replacement scrip.  
TT: Why didn't it work?  
TT: That's not the right question to ask.  
TT: The question to ask is, where do we go from here?  
TT: Nowhere but up, because I'm pretty sure this is rock fucking bottom, bro.  
TT: Seeing genuine optimism out of you always manages to spark my own happiness.  
TT: Sarcasm?  
TT: No, Dirk.  
TT: Sometimes, people do mean what they say.  
TT: Until Tuesday.  
TT: See you then.  
\-- timaeusTestified  [TT] stopped pestering tentacleTherapist  [TT] at 11:51 --


End file.
